


Baby Climb Up Here, Watch The City Glow

by FireflysLove



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 08:14:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4997362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireflysLove/pseuds/FireflysLove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Steve Rogers met his soulmate he was six years old with a black eye. </p>
<p>The second time he met his soulmate he was twenty-four and she gave someone else a black eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby Climb Up Here, Watch The City Glow

**Author's Note:**

> I had a dream, this thing was born. It's basically another excuse for my OT3 to get together. It will have one, maybe two more chapters. But it's ending pre-death train.

The first time Steve Rogers met his soulmate he was six years old with a black eye.

 

The second time he met his soulmate he was twenty-four and she gave someone else a black eye.

 

* * *

 

Steve’s first memory is of his mother. A cloud of blonde hair surrounding an angelic face, green eyes dancing as Steve does something to make her laugh. The faded outline of her soulmark peeks out from the collar of her dress, a reminder of the husband she’d lost in the Great War.

Steve was a sickly child, and it surprised everyone when he lived past his fifth birthday. As he grew, like most of the world’s population, a soulmark appeared on his skin. The faintest outline appeared at birth and by the time he turned ten, it was stark against the pale skin of his forearm. An abstract shape, every one was unique with only one match in the entire world.

What neither Steve nor Sarah told anyone was that there was another soulmark on his skin. Double matches weren’t unheard of, but very, very rare, and in the time of Steve’s childhood, a Double was not acknowledged by society.

Especially when the Double was someone of the same gender.

James Barnes dragged Steve Rogers out of a fight a few weeks after his own seventh birthday, and into an alley.

“Are you crazy?” he asked, shaking the small boy roughly by the shoulders.

“They were callin’ Mary nasty things!” Steve spat back.

“They coulda killed you!”

For that, Steve punched him in the nose.

That was how James Barnes found himself sitting at Sarah Rogers’ kitchen table, a cloth held under his nose to staunch the flow of blood.

“Steve, I want you to apologize,” she said.

“M’sorry,” Steve muttered.

“’S okay.”

“What’s your name anyway?”

“James Buchanan Barnes,” he said.

“That’s a lotta words,” Steve replied.

“Call me Bucky,” Bucky said.

 

* * *

 

The first time Steve saw Bucky’s soulmark, he was eight. It was late July and Brooklyn was boiling. They’d stripped down to their shorts and the fire department opened a fire hydrant for the children to play in. After splashing around for a few hours, they wandered back toward Steve’s home. Bucky was wildly gesticulating as he regaled Steve with a tale of his sister Becca’s antics. There, on Bucky’s ribs, was his soulmark.

And it Matched Steve’s Double.

He didn’t tell Bucky for years, as his Double sat high on the inside of his thigh where no one could see it, and no one would have cause to until the winter of 1934.

Girls were said to spend hours wondering who their soulmate was, fantasizing about the handsome man whose mark Matched their own. Steve and Bucky were not girls and did not spend hours wondering who their soulmate was. Sometimes Bucky would make an offhand joke about how Steve’s soulmate was going to be the prettiest girl either of them had ever seen. (As it turned out, she was, but they wouldn’t know that for a decade and a half.)

Around the time they were eleven and twelve, Bucky announced that soulmarks meant nothing.

Steve wouldn’t realize that he was in love with his best friend for another five years.

The first time Bucky kissed him, Steve was drunk off his rocker, the night of his mother’s funeral.

“I’m gonna get a job!” Steve said, slurring his words.

“Of course you are, Stevie,” Bucky said.

“I’m gonna live all by myself an’ I don’t need no one to help me,” Steve said.

“No one?” Bucky said.

“Nope!” Steve declared, then flopped down on the couch next to Bucky.

“What about the nice girl who must be your Match?” Bucky asked.

“Y’ever think it might not be a girl, Buck?” Steve said.

“What’re you sayin’, Stevie?” Bucky asked.

“Somethin’ I’ve been wantin’ to show you for years. Ma told me never tell anyone, but she’s gone now and I’m gonna do whatever I want,” Steve said, then stood up.

Bucky’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline when Steve reached for the buckle of his belt.

“What the hell, Steve?” Bucky said, standing and skittering back.

Steve shoved his pants down to his ankles, then stepped out of them.

“I’ve got a Double,” Steve said.

“What?” Bucky said, completely baffled by Steve’s actions.

“C’mere and look at it, jerk,” Steve said.

Cautiously, Bucky leaned forward and examined the soulmark that Steve gestured at. It matched the one on Bucky’s ribs perfectly.

“Holy shit,” Bucky breathed. “How come you never told me?”

“Jus’ told ya. Ma wouldn’t let me,” Steve said. “But since I been in love with you since I known ya, figured I might as well show you now.”

If he were sober, Steve would’ve expected Bucky to turn tail and run at that admission, but what he did instead was grab Steve’s face in his hands and kissed the life out of him.

It probably would have gone further if Steve hadn’t passed out on Bucky’s chest fifteen minutes later.

For the next six years, they lived together, hiding their true relationship from the world, but falling more and more in love with each other day by day.

The day Bucky’s numbers were up, they broke their relationship off, a screaming argument that resulted in Bucky slamming the door and moving back in with his parents. They reconciled, as friends, but it was strained until Bucky shipped out.

And Steve volunteered for a science experiment.

 

* * *

 

Bucky never told Steve he had a Double too.

**Author's Note:**

> [Yell at me on Tumblr!](http://fireflyslove.tumblr.com)


End file.
